Oral-History:Charles Rader

About Charles Rader

Charles M. Rader was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York and attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He received an undergraduate degree in 1960 and a master's degree in 1961, both in electrical engineering. He accepted a position at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in 1961, where he has been since that time. He began his early forays in electrical engineering through his early interest in artificial intelligence and speech processing. Overall, his research has focused on speech bandwidth compression digital signal processing, and space-based radar systems. One of his major accomplishments was as a leader of the team that helped build the LES-8 and LES-9 communications satellites launched in 1976. He is the author or co-author of Digital Signal Processing (with Ben Gold), Number Theory in Digital Signal Processing (with James McClellan), and Digital Signal Processing (with Lawrence Rabiner). Rader is a Fellow of the IEEE (1978) [Fellow award for "contributions to digital signal processing"], and was formerly the president of ASSP. He received the ASSP Technical Achievement Award (1976), and the ASSP Society Award (1985).

The interview tells us little of the earliest influences in the life of Charles Rader, or what sparked his initial interest in electrical engineering. Instead, it focuses upon Rader's contributions to the sub-fields of speech processing and his involvement in various professional organizations, including the ASSP and the IEEE. The interview ends with an interesting look at Rader's participation in the official acoustical inquiry after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.